Inequality

Pain and Valor:

The greatest leap of faith at the root of our foundations is the declaration that it is self-evident that all men are created equal. Inequality is the fact:

Inequality is a tricky concept. Typically when people talk about inequality in a political context they have in mind not inequality of virtue or beauty or intelligence, etc., but inequality of material conditions.

Those inequalities are manifest, though, and we cannot deny them. Indeed, they aren't even linked the way we would like to dream that they should be. Wealth and happiness are not linked, nor wealth and virtue, nor intelligence and virtue. Here writes a very wealthy, very unhappy woman:

[I]t’s clear that females are dissatisfied—more and more, divorce seems to be initiated by women. If marriage is the Old World and what lies beyond is the New World, it’s the apparently stable men... who are Old Worlders, and the Girls’ Night Out, questionnaire-completing women who are the questing New Worlders. They most embody what Tocqueville described as America’s “restless temper,” or l’inquiétude du caractère (Interestingly, according to EnlightenNext magazine, some northern European women are reportedly eschewing their progressive northern European male counterparts and dating Muslims, who are more like “real men.”)....

To a certain extent, men today may have more clarity about what it takes to raise children in the modern age. They don’t, for instance, have today’s working mother’s ambivalence and emotional stickiness.

Sickness. Again, the culture of seeing emotional difficulty as a kind of illness, needing medication and 'therapy.' The therapy brings no cure, and the despair grows.

Despair is a mortal sin. That has been forgotten, but it was one of the greatest insights of the old faith.

More and more these days, I think we hide from our own knowledge of what is right because somehow we've decided that morality is too difficult.... But right and wrong haven't changed. It is we who changed.

Have we? I knew my grandfather, and I share his flaws -- and his virtues, if I may be bold enough to say so. Is that not the answer? Does not the lady say:

[I]t’s clear that females are dissatisfied.... Interestingly, according to EnlightenNext magazine, some northern European women are reportedly eschewing their progressive northern European male counterparts and dating Muslims, who are more like “real men.”

Is that not the answer? A virtus is a strength, an excellence: the kind of quality that you find in warriors, heroes, tamers of horses. Women are dissatisfied, she says: and why would they not be, with this crop? She sketches a gentle man who is very far from a gentleman: for as Blackstone says, a gentleman is one "qui arma gerit."

That is, "one who bears arms."....

Blackstone notes, as does the Oxford English Dictionary, that the "arms" in question are heraldic arms -- that is, symbolic ones. Those symbolic arms, however, were the later representation of what was earlier a very real right: the right to bear not only weapons, but armor onto the field. Heraldry describes the shield of a fighter. In the Middle Ages, the sort entitled to such a shield were those with the literal right to bear arms. It is only in these more decadent ages -- in more decadent countries -- that this right has become purely symbolic....

In America, the right to bear arms is secured in the Constitution itself. If you wish to register heraldic arms, the link to the American College of Heraldry is on the right. If you wish to bear literal ones, you have the right to do so. Every American man can be a gentleman.

To do so, though, requires that you constitute yourself a defender of your country and its civilization. It is not enough to say, as did Dutch humanist Oscar van den Boogaard:

"I am not a warrior, but who is?" he shrugged. "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it."

No, that is not a gentleman, though he wears the finest clothes and writes the finest novels, keeps the best society, and has the finest manners. He has only the accidents of a gentleman. He has nothing of its essence.

The essence is to bear arms, in defense of country and civilization. That is the real thing, the root of the tradition. The arms may be symbolic, or they may be actual. The defense must be devout.

That may sit ill with some, but there it is. Honi soit qui mal y pense, goes the motto of the greatest of England's knightly orders.

That motto is normally translated as, "Evil to him who thinks evil of it." A more contemporary translation might rightly be: "To hell with you if you don't like it." Such a declaration is the essence of 'real manhood': a defense of what you love, and a defiance of the world to love it also, or stand aside.

When men are men, women are not dissatisfied. As you love women, then, defend manhood.

In a sense, these women have brought this on themselves: for they have not. Yet their pain is real, and no man ought to like to see a woman in pain.

UPDATE: As I reflect on this, this morning, I can think of several things that work against the concept. There is certainly female infidelity where men are very much men -- the famous "Jody problem" in the military, for example. The men are deployed, and the women are lonely. Here, too, the women are dissatisfied, but it is hardly the fault of the men, who are doing only their duty. (It is certainly the partial fault of one of the men, i.e., Jody.)

The absence of a 'real man' from their life is still the root of the problem, though in these cases the absence is caused by duty, one of the very things that defines a real man. The woman's lack of strength and faithfulness is at least as much at fault in these cases.